Tom Moore, my old friend and brilliant cover designer, who has Skullduggery Pleasant amongst others under his belt, came up with this final version after a huge struggle.

I originally wanted a girl lying down, being fed a dream by the Dreamspinners. Note the girl on the back cover above who happens to be my daughter, who posed for the photos.

(BTW Check out her pink, metal framed glasses. Read on into the book series and you'll find out why!)

Sometimes these things aren't meant to be.

No matter how hard we tried, the composition didn't work.After trying all sorts of angles, colours and different variations this is the draft he could come up with and neither of us liked it at all:

Actually, it's plain awful. Worse, my daughter looks... dead.

Time to rip it up and start again. If you haven't tucked into SPIDER WEB POWDER (and I thoroughly recommend you do!) there's a scene where Daisy visits the haunted garden and notices a gate. She's drawn towards it and the moment she goes through we slip into a new world.

After a load of soul-searching this moment probably captures the overall FEEL of the book.

Time for gate research. We came across a few reasonable ones, like these:

If you’ve read SWP let me know which one you think is most like the one in the book! (1-5 - top left and clockwise)

The gate appeared. But the cover still looked a bit... bland. Soulless.

Tom found a female silhouette cut-out to give depth. An excellent decision!

But even then we weren't finished. What about the dust? I wanted dust!

And I got dust. For about a minute.

Finally, after an agonising time, we "found" the real cover, minus dust.

What do you think. Interesting or crazy?

Every cover has its moments, some more than others. But I learnt that design, like writing isn't easy. Creativity is often about trial, error, and patience. I can definitely attest to all of those!